The present invention relates in general to a system and a method for circuit compliance compensated pressure-regulated volume control in a patient respiratory ventilator, and more particularly, to a system and a method suitable for providing ventilation to patients at all sizes and ages by effectively and accurately estimating and compensating for the patient circuit compliance.
In order to deliver an accurate set tidal volume to a patient in a respiratory ventilation system, the patient circuit compliance has to be compensated. The compensation of patient circuit compliance is especially crucial for neonatal patients whose lung compliance can be as small as about one thirteenth of the circuit compliance. Without compensation for the circuit compliance, inaccurate volume delivery and inadequate flow will be delivered to the patient. Therefore, various designs and algorithms have been proposed to facilitate the patient circuit compliance compensation in the respiratory ventilation system. Currently, the setting or approaches in many of the circuit compliance compensation designs or algorithms cannot achieve precise volume delivery especially for neonatal patients without the risk of over delivering volume. Therefore, most of the ventilators available in the market do not allow for circuit compliance compensation designs applied to neonatal patients due to the stringent precision requirement on volume delivery. The burden of achieving accurate volume delivery is then left for the clinician.
Currently, algorithms that directly add an estimate of patient circuit volume to a set tidal volume are commonly used. An estimate of patient circuit volume is added to a set tidal volume by increasing the volume target, which ultimately increments the target peak airway pressure. The patient circuit volume is computed using the average peak airway pressure of previous mandatory breaths and an estimate of the patient circuit compliance, the patient circuit volume is thus continuously elevated breath after breath. Due to positive feedback of average peak airway pressure, when directly accounting for the circuit volume this algorithmic approach can establish a runaway (not converge) condition especially on neonatal patient sizes where the ratio of circuit compliance to patient (lung) compliance can be as high as 13:1. Moreover, this algorithm is not robust in cases where airway resistance is high due to effects such as gas compression which occurs as a result of positive feedback of peak airway pressure. Therefore, this algorithm is only effective on adults and some pediatrics patient sizes, and may not be responsive when changes in airway resistance and/lung compliance occur. A positive feedback approach to directly account for the circuit compliance/volume can thus have many adverse affects.
Therefore, there is a substantial need to develop a system and a method to provide circuit compliance compensated pressure regulated volume control in a patient respiratory ventilation system for the patients at all ages and sizes without causing any of the above adverse effects.